Unless otherwise indicated herein, the materials described in this section are not prior art to the claims in this application and are not admitted to be prior art by inclusion in this section.
A variety of methods exist to image biological tissues or other materials at the micro-scale (i.e., at scales at or smaller than a few micrometers). Such methods can include optical microscopy according to a variety of different illumination schemes and using optical systems configured in a variety of different ways. Samples to be imaged could be broadly illuminated (e.g., in bright-field microscopy), exposed to some structured illumination (e.g., light sheet microscopy), exposed to polarized illumination (e.g., phase contrast microscopy), exposed to illumination at one or more specified points (e.g., confocal microscopy), or illuminated according to some other scheme. Conversely, light can be received and/or focused from the samples to be imaged in a variety of ways; light can be received from a wide field of the sample and focused on an imager, subjected to an aperture (e.g., an aperture corresponding to an aperture used to illuminate the sample as in, e.g., confocal microscopy) before being imaged by an imager or light sensor, or received by some other means. Further, light of different wavelengths can be used to illuminate a sample (e.g., to excite a fluorophore in the sample) and/or light of different wavelengths can be detected from the sample to determine spectrographic information (e.g., emission spectra, excitation spectra, absorbance spectra) about the sample or according to some other application.